Nothing could be a surer sign that SF has come into its own in the academic world than
this initiation by the Oxford University Press of a Science Fiction Writers Series under
the general editorship of so distinguished a scholar as Robert Scholes, who writes:

In each volume we will include a general view of the author's life and work, critical
interpretations of his or her major contributions to the field of science fiction, and a
biographical and bibliographical apparatus that will make these volumes useful as a
reference tool. The format of each book will thus be similar. But because the writers to
be considered have had careers of different shapes, and because our critics are all
individuals who have earned the right to their own interpretative emphases, each book will
take its own shape within the limits of the general format. Above all, each book will
express the critical view of its author rather than some predetermined party line. (p.
viii of each volume)

Before exploring the question of how well each of these books fulfills this promise,
let us grant that in series of this general kind the books are intended to provide
comparatively brief introductory surveys rather than extensive critiques of individual
works or full-scale assemblages of the facts uncovered by scholarship.

By my count Heinlein has published 27 novels and 54 shorter stories that can be
considered SF or fantasy. Professor Franklin's primary bibliography is complete, with the
stories listed in order of first appearance and with a supplementary list of short-story
collections and omnibus volumes; and in his text proper Professor Franklin deals at
adequate length with each and every one. For Wells the figures are somewhat smaller.
Professor McConnell's primary bibliography is simply a chronological list of Wells's
books, with no distinction between fiction and non-fiction and thus with none between
mundane fiction and SF or fantasy, and in his text he deals with only 15 of the 19
SF-or-fantasy novels and only 8 of the 42 SF-or-fantasy shorter stories. If such omissions
are justified by Professor Scholes, "major contributions to the field of science
fiction," the criteria for selection and emphasis are still subject to question and
debate.

In a 1921 preface Wells noted that The War in the Air, When the Sleeper Wakes, and
The World Set Free belonged to a series of his stories which were "usually
spoken of as 'scientific romances' or 'futurist romances,' but which it would be far
better to call "fantasias of possibility,"' for they "take some developing
possibility in human affairs and work it out so as to develop the broad consequences of
that possibility."1 In the preface to a 1933 UK
volume, The Scientific Romances of H. G. Wells, he stressed the differences
between the "anticipatory inventions" of Jules Verne and "these stories of
mine collected here," which "do not pretend to deal with possible things,"
being "exercises of the imagination in a quite different field."2
In 1934 this collection, with one of the eight "romances" omitted and the
preface minimally amended to acknowledge that omission, was published in the US as Seven
Famous Novels of H. G. Wells.

Professor McConnell has based the organization of his book on the 1934 US volume, for,
he says, "Wells wrote for the collection a preface implicitly acknowledging that
these were the main body of his work as a science-fiction writer (he suggested adding only
Men Like Gods, 1923, as the last of his scientific romances)" (p. 185).
Evidently unfamiliar with Wells's distinction between "scientific romances" and
"fantasias of possibility," and unaware of the relationship of the UK and US
volumes, Professor McConnell seems not to have considered the possibility that the Seven
Famous Novels might have been chosen on the basis of genre rather than as the author's
major works in what we today call SF.

After two introductory chapters, Professor McConnell devotes Chapter 3 to The Time
Machine and The Island of Doctor Moreau as "Evolutionary Fables"
and Chapter 4 to The Invisible Man and The War of the Worlds as the work
of a great "Realist of the Fantastic." So far, so good. These four romances,
together with The First Men in the Moon, have always been the most widely and
intensely admired of Wells's SF novels. Each of the five is comparatively short, rich in
imagery, and so highly concentrated that what remains most vivid in the memory is a single
object, horrible or wondrous in itself, and so richly symbolic that it illuminates all
that precedes or follows its revelation: the Eloi-Morlock community, Moreau's House of
Pain, Griffin's invisibility, the ruthless power and destructiveness of the Martians, the
Selenite community. Professor McConnell is excellent on the literary qualities and
satisfactory on the intellectual content of the first four novels, and does well enough in
Chapter 5 with the literary qualities of The First Men in the Moon. But the case
is different when he treats the fantasias of possibility and the later romances as
somewhat inferior novels of essentially the same kind, for these are discursive rather
than concentrated, comic rather than lyric, and literal or allegorical rather than
symbolic.

The case is also different with respect to the intellectual content of the novels yet
to be dealt with. At least part of the trouble rises from the organization of Chapter 5,
"Dreams of the Future." The introduction discusses the rise of Edwardian
optimism, Wells's turning to sociological essays in Anticipations, and When
the Sleeper Wakes. The three sections of the chapter are then devoted to the
remaining "major works" (The First Men in the Moon, The Food of the Gods, and
In the Days of the Comet), with no indication that Anticipations was
written after the first and before the second. If Professor McConnell had understood the
importance of Anticipations not just to the expression but to the development
of Wells's thought, if he had studied Anticipations and Mankind in the
Making, he would perhaps have realized that Sleeper and First Men belong
to the visionary universe of the pre-Anticipations period, whereas The Food
of the Gods and its successors belong to a quite different vision, one in which the
purposes and rhetoric of the author have undergone a significant change.

One of the most persistent themes in Wells's fiction is that of the conflict between
love and honor; or, to use the terms of his times, between aestheticism and priggishness
or, if you will, simply the desire to escape from the troubles of this dreary world, and
especially from responsibility in great affairs. In Wells this theme has its first notable
expression in "A Dream of Armageddon," which he once called "obviously a
by-product of the manufacture" of When theSleeper Wakes,3 but which was not published until 1901 and so may have been
written at the same time as or even after Anticipations; that is, at a time when
Wells had turned from the aestheticism of literature to an earnest wrestling with the
details of the politics and economics of the actual world in which he lived. Be that as it
may, it was in The Sea Lady (1902) that he first treated the theme at book
length, and in "The Door in the Wall" (1906) that he gave it perhaps its most
perfect expression. The three stories cited here are among those unmentioned by Professor
McConnell, who has nothing at all to say about the relevance of any such theme to In
the Days of the Comet or about its importance in virtually all the novels and
romances that follow, including most of those he discusses as well as those he passes
over.

The sixth and final chapter, "Outlines for History," runs rapidly through
most of the remaining SF novels from The War in the Air to Star Begotten.
There are also brief treatments of Tono-Bungay and The Outline of History,
and a paragraph on the books associated with the Open Conspiracy, but nothing at all on
the The Holy Terror, the SF novel on the way in which the Open Conspiracy might
reach its goals through the politics of British discontent. Since The Shape of Things
to Come is the book treated at greatest length in this chapter, I feel bound to point
out that Professor McConnell is perpetuating an absurd error--one that presumably arose
from the film based on the book-- when he writes that "The war to come is awful
beyond all man's imagining" (p. 207; cf. p. 27); for this 1933 novel is a
"fantasia of possibility" in which the "developing possibility in human
affairs" is not the destructiveness of war but the spreading and deepening of the
Great Depression, which brings about the disintegration of the US and the enfeeblement of
the governments of Europe to such a degree that when war does come they have no resources
with which to wage it in other than a very limited and desultory fashion.

There is similar careless reading and perpetuation of critical error in the statement
that the "once-meager finances" of the sleeping Graham "have accumulated
interest to the point where his immense wealth is the (untouched and untouchable)
cornerstone of the world's economy" (pp. 151-52).4When
I first read When the Sleeper Wakes, in the Winter 1928 issue of Amazing
Stories Quarterly, I was infinitely puzzled by an illustration for which I could find
no scene in the story, and this puzzle continued to bother me until 1967, when I consulted
the 1899 volume of Harper's Weekly and there found both the illustration and the
scene--a scene omitted from the revised version of the story published the same year in
book form and reprinted in Amazing 30 years later. Professor McConnell, who is
seldom so pedantic as to specify his text, seems also to have read the story in the Weekly,5 for he tells us that "Graham dies in a final airplane
duel against Ostrog (who also dies), and his mangled body is discovered by a simple
shepherd, an heir to the immemorial cycles of pastoral life, who understands nothing of
the great struggle that has been waged in a city he has never seen" and that
"the love of the good things of the earth" is "symbolized by the
shepherd," who is "one of Wells's most important characters" (p. 153). In
the book Ostrog escapes to fight another day, and the shepherd does not appear at all:
this is the scene that worried me for 40 years. As for immemorial cycles and the good
things of the earth, Professor McConnell should not have written about pastoralism in When
the Sleeper Wakes without first reading its companion piece, "A Story of the
Days to Come."

I have said that Professor McConnell is excellent on the literary qualities of Wells's
five best-loved romances. Let me now add that he is eminently fair and reasonable when
dealing with Wells's political thought, whether or not he understands it very well. He
gives Wells the benefit of the doubt; he does not toss around words like
"elitist" or "fascist" or (God save the mark!) "naive," so
that the student or instructor who reads this book as an introduction to Wells will not
come away, as he or she well might after reading certain other books or articles, with the
feeling that Wells really had nothing worthwhile to say about the way the world was going
in the first half of our dreadful century.

When Professor Franklin was asked to write his book for this series, he hesitated for
fear that he could not be fair to Heinlein, but having thought it over he decided that
Heinlein was to be understood as "a very representative American," one who
"embodies the contradictions that have been developing in our society ever since the
Depression flowed into World War II" (pp. 5-6). America and Heinlein, however
democratic and progressive they may have been when the US and the USSR were allied against
the menace of Nazism, both went wrong between 1947 and 1949, for

By the middle of 1949 the United States had committed itself to a global crusade
against Communism. Loyalty checks and loyalty dossiers were now a characteristic feature
of American life. The unions, the media, and the schools were being systematically purged
of Communist sympathizers. On September 21, 1949, the People's Republic of China was
proclaimed in Peking. Two days later, President Truman announced that the Soviet Union had
set off an atomic explosion, thus ending the U.S. nuclear monopoly. In November and
December 1949 Robert Heinlein published in Astounding the novella
"Gulf," an anti-communist diatribe arguing the need of a master race of supermen
to settle the problems of our time and the future. (p. 94)

Since 1949, according to Professor Franklin, a wicked America has done everything in
its power to establish and maintain capitalist oppression throughout the world: and
Heinlein, though sometimes pessimistic about the survival of freedom and decency in the
capitalist world, has steadfastly opposed the spread of that communism through which the
heroic peoples of the Third World are leading humanity into a beautiful future in which
there will be no imperialism, no elitism, no hierarchies.

Although I consider its account of 20th-century history (set forth in many passages
like the one just quoted) simplistic and one-sided, and its politics absurd, my main
objection to Professor Franklin's book is that it analyzes Heinlein's fictions as if they
were essays. Since "Gulf" is a superman story on the order of Star Begotten,
Odd John, or Slan, its analysis must begin with the acceptance (for the sake
of the argument) of its SF données. Now I happen to believe, and I suppose you would
agree, that the differences in human intelligence form a continuum that could be graded,
if we had some accurate way of measuring intelligence, on a scale, say, of one to ten. But
suppose it were discovered that one person in ten thousand is an exception, standing to
the brightest of the other 9.999 not as to to 9.999 but as 100 to 10, and suppose that you
and I discovered that we belonged to this superhuman ten-thousandth of the species. What
should we do? In Heinlein's story the superhumans keep their existence secret, secretly
organize themselves, secretly see to it that world government is organized along liberal
democratic lines, secretly keep watch over human affairs, intervening now and then, but
only now and then, to make sure humanity does not destroy iself, and secretly begin an
endogamic breeding program that will increase their numbers and perhaps after a thousand
years allow Homo novas to supersede Homo sapiens. Since the real
Heinlein does not believe in the real existence of such superhumans in the real world,
Professor Franklin is flatly wrong to say that "'Gulf' unequivocally advocates
creating an elite not just as a social class, but, as the title suggests, as a new
superhuman species, clearly marked off from our doomed race of `homo sap'" (p. 95).
The most that Heinlein can be charged with is suggesting that if such superhumans did
exist they might well behave more or less like the superhumans of "Gulf" rather
than, say, those of Odd John.

The extent to which Professor Franklin's critical method can distort a concept may be
illustrated by his treatment of the Twenty Universes of Glory Road. The empress,
he writes, "is the ultimate philosopher-king, genetically selected to rule and then
filled with the 7000 years of accumulated experience of all past rulers" and this is
[set forth as] the most rational form of government" (p. 149). Professor Franklin to
the contrary, the emperors or empresses of the Twenty Universes do not rule, and their
"empire" is not a government. If you insist that Heinlein's fantasy of 20
universes must have some relevance to the politics of our one-planet world (my feeling is
that it has none whatever), that relevance might be best expressed in this way: if
superhumans of godlike omniscience and benevolence actually exist in outer space or other
dimensions, it would be well if one of them would consent to serve Earth as Supreme
Arbiter of International Disputes; he would not interfere in the internal affairs of any
country ("Local affairs are local. Infanticide?--they're your babies": chapter
17), and like the World Court of our real world he would have no power to enforce his
judgments--such power being unnecessary since we would know that his godly decrees
proceeded from godly wisdom. All which, of course, is too absurd to be taken seriously as
the serious thought of the author.

As for the ignoring of context, let us consider the treatment of a passage in which
Scar Gordon, our hero, is lectured by Rufo, our wise old man:

'Democracy can't work. Mathematicians, peasants, and animals, that's all there is--so
democracy, a theory based on the assumption that mathematicians and peasants are equal,
can never work. Wisdom is not additive; its maximum is that of the wisest man in a given
group.

'But a democratic form of government is okay, as long as it doesn't work. Any
social organization does well enough if it isn't rigid. The framework doesn't matter as
long as there is enough looseness to permit that one man in a multitude to display his
genius. Most so-called social scientists seem to think that organization is everything. It
is almost nothing--except when it is a straight jacket. It is the incidence of heroes that
counts, not the pattern of zeros.'

He added, 'Your country [the USA of 1963] has a system free enough to let its heroes
work at their trade. It should last a long time--unless its looseness is destroyed from
inside.' (chapter 20)

Having quoted only the first of these three paragraphs, Professor Franklin writes as
follows:

No wonder the poor hero had been so dissatisfied with the realities of his own world, a
fictive universe that mirrors this confusion about wisdom and government. So the fictional
hero can interact with the real peasants of the twentieth-century world only by killing as
many of them as possible in Vietnam, for how could be possibly understand the peasants'
belief that the interests of the peasants are best understood and protected not by the
Empress of the Twenty Universes but by the peasants themselves. (pp. 149-50)

The absurdity in all this is that Rufo and the Empress would agree that "the
interests of the peasants are best understood and protected by... themselves," as
would our hero when he returns to the Glory Road in the last sentence of the novel,
"Got any dragons you need killed?" A Supreme Arbiter would be appealed to only
if the peasants were involved in an international dispute, and our hero, as a knight
errant, would intervene only if retained by the peasants to do so--or by their enemies,
who might also have a case. The man who led the Vietnamese in their war against the French
and then in their struggle to unite Vietnam on Marxist-Leninist principles was not a
peasant but a middle-class intellectual trained in Paris, Moscow and Canton in the heroic
art of slaying capitalist dragons.

The governments of the future societies depicted by Heinlein are almost always of a
liberal democratic type, more or less efficient, more or less corrupt, and more or less
oppressive. Such governments are always more or less subject to manipulation by
administrators or political bosses, and Heinlein delights in portraying heroes who cut
corners or perform illegal acts in order to benefit an ignorant populace. In the history
of democratic government it has always been assumed that although there are some questions
that should be put to the entire electorate and some that should be decided by the
legislature, there are also matters (matters often not formulatable as questions) that can
be handled only by the executive. When characters in Heinlein make scornful remarks about
democracy, the referent seems always to be not such governments as have actually existed
in the real world, but that imaginary type of government in which all questions are put to
the entire electorate--"It would be pleasant to discuss each problem, take a vote,
then repeal it later if the collective judgment proved faulty"--and the context seems
always to be a "life-and-death emergency" (Star Beast, chapter 15). In
sum, the "democracy" that Heinleinian heroes reject with scorn seems to be a
mere straw man and the statements of rejection mere obiter dicta. Professor Franklin, in
taking these banalities seriously, seems to be arguing that even life-and-death
emergencies should be debated, formulated as questions, and put to the entire electorate
before any action is taken.

There are times indeed when Heinlein's obiter dicta are either morally appalling or
intellectually absurd. Sentimental clichés have their inverse in cynical banalities, and
though such cynicisms may strike unsophisticated readers as delightfully shocking and
daringly iconoclastic, they are just as much a part of the popular culture as the
sentimentalities. In Heinlein the most appalling instance is perhaps a statement made by
the hero of The Puppet Masters, "I felt warm and relaxed, as if I had just
killed a man or had a woman" (chapter 9), which I take to be not a characterization
of the hero but an expression of Heinlein's view of human nature, a view also expressed
with some frequency in the eagerness of Heinleinian heroes to enjoy the personal
satisfaction they believe to be found in the killing of wicked villains--the wickeder the
villain, the greater the satisfaction. As for intellectual absurdities, my personal
favorites in Heinlein have to do with a man Heinlein would surely admire if he were at all
familiar with his life and work. In an address to the Brigade of Midshipmen at Annapolis,
Heinlein quoted "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel" and then refuted
this supposed slur on patriotism by describing Dr. Johnson as a "fat, gluttonous slob
who was pursued all his life by a pathological fear of death" and as a "fat
poltroon."6And in The Number of the Beast,
one of the heroes tells us that "Johnson was a fat, pompous, gluttonous, dirty old
fool who would have faded into the obscurity he so richly deserved had he not been
followed around by a spit-licking sycophant" (chapter 34).

But more often the obiter dicta are merely quixotic. The adult hero of The Star
Beast is the United Nations Permanent Undersecretary for Spatial Affairs, who is
nominally subject to a political appointee, the Secretary. For some years or decades, we
gather, the Secretaries have been mere figureheads, routinely approving any action taken
by Under Secretary. But in the crisis that arises in the story, the Secretary and Under
Secretary disagree on what should be done. When the Secretary attempts to dismiss the
Under Secretary and take control himself, he finds that the political strengths of the
Under Secretary are greater than his own, so that it is he who is forced to resign. This
story could of course have been told in the opposite way (as Heinlein has sometimes done),
with the official superior a competent politician and the official subordinate a
presumptuous and foolish bureaucrat. Whichever way it was told, it would probably have
passed unnoticed by Professor Franklin if our hero had not seized the opportunity for
philosophizing on the impossibility of "real democracy." Professor Franklin
misinterprets both this philosophizing and the events of the story when he writes,
"Since the people are merely foolish passengers [on the ship of state], we discover
through the course of events that it is the duty of the government to deceive and
manipulate us for our own good" (p. 86), for there is no deception or manipulation of
the people on the part of the Under Secretary, and the philosophizing is indulged in
simply to assuage the guilt he feels over going beyond his authority in a life-and-death
emergency that could not possibly have been formulated as a question and submitted to
either the electorate or the legislature.

If we can say that tendentious misinterpretation is a vice of criticism rather than
scholarship, then we can and must also say that from the standpoint of scholarship, or
even pedantry. Professor Franklin cannot be seriously faulted. We have already noted that
his primary bibliography is complete and well organized, and the same thing can be said of
his secondary bibliography. He journeyed to Butler and Kansas City to learn what he could
of the social environment in which Heinlein passed his childhood and youth; he sought and
obtained an interview with Heinlein, and submitted his manuscript to him for comment. In
dealing with the early fiction he uses the original magazine texts but does not fail to
consider the revisions made for book publication. Since Heinlein's career falls rather
neatly into periods (1939-42, the Future History and Anson MacDonald stories; 1947-59, the
juvenile novels and other New Frontier stories; 1961-66, Stranger in a Strange Land and
other "adult" novels; 1970-73, IWill Fear No Evil and Time
Enough for Love; 1980, The Number of the Beast), the organization of the
book into chapters apparently presents no problems. Even so, there is one point in this
periodization that might be debated.

Although the careers of Wells and Heinlein are vastly different, there is one curious
parallel in the shapes of those careers. Just as Wells, after achieving fame and fortune
in literary work, turned to the serious study of social and political problems, so
Heinlein, after success in the pulps and concurrent with success in more profitable
literary fields, attempted to make himself a force in public opinion through articles
"intended to shed light on the post-Hiroshima age." But whereas Wells was
successful both with the public and (more important) in the organization of his knowledge
and opinions into a coherent philosophy that would sustain all his subsequent work,
Heinlein failed completely to find a market for his articles and also (if I may judge)
failed to achieve a world-view sufficiently detailed and coherent to allow him to respond
to public events on anything other than a virtually ad hoc basis. The climax to his
endeavor evidently came in 1958, during the controversy over the testing of nuclear
weapons, when "the rug was jerked out from under us; by executive order Mr Eisenhower
cancelled all testing without requiring mutual inspection." "Stunned by the
president's action," he abandoned non-literary attempts to influence public opinion,
and turned to the writing of Starship Troopers.7

So I think that Starship Troopers should be said to mark not the end of
Heinlein's second period but the beginning of his third--or rather that it marks the
beginning of the second half of his career. The stories and novels published before 1959
are generally consonant with the prevailing liberal ideology; those published since have
not only subjected that ideology to withering attack but have also been generally
different from the earlier work in rhetoric and purpose: discursive, didactic,
anarchistic, solipsistic, with the solipsism apparently no longer a mere reductio ad
absurdum for the purposes of ingenious story-telling but instead the very basis of his
world view.

We must now return to Professor McConnell's bibliography. With no reference whatever to
the splendid 1929 volume by Geoffrey H. Wells, or to its updating in 1977 by J.R. Hammond,
or to my own SF-oriented "Chronological Survey" of 1973, Professor McConnell
informs his readers that the Wells Society bibliography of 1968 is "the best guide
through the undergrowth" of Wells's work (p. 221). His "Select List of Works
about H.G. Wells" includes only 27 titles: 17 books with the name Wells plainly in
the title, 5 books on SF (Aldiss, Amis, Clarke, Gunn, and Scholes-Rabkin), and 5 general
works (Caudwell, Chesterton, Hynes, Pritchett, West). Two of the books are
essay-collections, but there is no listing of or annotations for the individual essays. In
nearly all the books cited Wells's SF is treated in a merely summary fashion, so that this
"select list" is almost entirely a guide to more of the same kind of
introductory material rather than a guide to such extensive critiques of individual works
as would deepen and broaden the student's understanding of Wells's SF.

Although Professor Franklin's secondary bibliography is not deficient in these ways,
the point I am leading up to applies to his book as well as Profesor McConnell's. There
are those teachers who believe that above all things the student should not be confused
and that the best way to keep her or him unconfused is to tell the uncomplicated truth
about what the author has to say: critics may differ, but we won't bother ourselves with
their differences. Professors Franklin and McConnell seldom pause to indicate that other
critics have seen this story or that in a quite different way, and on the few occasions
they do so pause they never actually engage the other critics in argument. The concluding
sentence in Professor Scholes's editorial statement promises that "each book will
express the critical view of its author rather than some predetermined party line."
That promise, for what it's worth, has been kept. But wouldn't it be better if the author
did not attempt simply to impose his or her own line on the reader? Would it not be best
if the books were written in a way that acknowledged scholarship and criticism as an
ongoing dialogue in which the reader has a part to play--a part that can be adequately
played only if the reader hears the other side of the argument?

NOTES

1. H.G. Wells. The War in the Air (NY: Macmillan,
1927),p.5. Similar prefaces are to found in certain reprints of The World Set Free and
The Sleeper Awakes.

2. For the text of the 1933 preface, annotated for changes made for
the 1934 US volume, see Patrick Parrinder and Robert M. Philmus, H. G. Wells's
Literary Criticism Sussex & NJ: Harvester & Barnes & Noble, 1980),
pp.240-45.

3. The Works of H.G. Wells, Atlantic Edition. 3[1924]: x.

4. Although several SF stories have been written about the miracles
of compound interest, Wells was not so ignorant as to imagine that the growth of a sum of
money through interest could be out of all proportion to the growth of the economy in
which it functioned. For the details of how the great Company based on Graham's fortune
came to dominate the world, see Chapter 11 in either When the Sleeper Wakes or The
Sleeper Awakes and/or Chapter 14 in the former. In the 1960 still-in-print Dover
volume, Three Prophetic Novels of H.G. Wells, the pertinent page numbers are
73-74 and 99-101.

5. Or perhaps the Graphic, which also serialized the
story, for on page 33 Professor McConnell writes: "As Graham...dies he pronounces a
single grim judgment on the men of the future struggling for their freedom: `Weak
men.'" Graham, as his broken aeropile is falling to earth, begins to imagine that he
is dreaming, but that at least Helen was real, and that surely he will wake and meet her.
The book ends with, "he was suddenly aware that the earth was very near." In the
serial, the shepherd standing over Graham's broken body can make out only five words.
"`Helen'... meet'...`Wake and meet'" (Harpers Weekly, 43)[1899],
452-53). I can account for Professor McConnell's version, with Graham thinking about
politics rather than feeling that his life in A.D. 2100 has been only a dream only on the
assumption that the text he read differs radically from those I've read.